Intel® Boot Loader Development Kit

The Intel® Boot Loader Development Kit (Intel® BLDK) is a software toolkit that allows creation of customized and optimized initialization firmware solutions for embedded Intel® processor-based platforms. Intel BLDK enables rapid development of firmware for fixed-function embedded designs—those requiring basic initialization and functionality rather than the full capabilities delivered with a traditional BIOS.

The foundation of Intel BLDK is Intel’s latest implementation of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Specification; version 2.3 is the Intel® UEFI Development Kit 2010 (Intel® UDK2010). Consequently, Intel BLDK is fully compliant with the latest UEFI standards and is compatible for use with the Intel® UEFI Development Kit Debugger Tool and UEFI Shell Specification Version 2.0. Because Intel BLDK is based on open UEFI standards and the Intel UDK2010 implementation, a significant portion of the source code is openly available to provide flexibility for customizing the firmware initialization of code.

Intel® System Studio

Intel® System Studio, a separate tool suite, provides a flexible solution to debug bootloaders developed with Intel BLDK as well as firmware and traditional BIOS. The Intel® JTAG Debugger (XDB) included with Intel System Studio allows full inspection and source level debug of EFI and UEFI data structures, all via an easy to use load command (EFI “loadthis”).